Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  The Some Girls sessions began on October 10, 1977, and went through late November. Mick hired London engineer Chris Kimsey to work on the album because he admired the crisp bass and drum sounds Kimsey had given Peter Frampton and Bad Company. The rhythm section was ecstatic for once. “He [Kimsey] did get beautiful sounds for me and Charlie,” Bill Wyman said, “and that inspires you and turns everyone on to your playing.” Ian Stewart wouldn’t play on any of the Stones’ driven, demonic new songs, so Mick started playing rhythm guitar, giving the band a raw, three-pronged attack on the early demos. These were Ron Wood’s first official sessions as a member of the band, since he’d mostly played bass or sung backup on Black and Blue. They worked on a track titled “Rotten Roll,” an early version of “Before They Make Me Run.” “Lazy Bitch” was the working title for what became “Hang Fire.” “Start Me Up” was birthed as a reggae song. They were prolific and very on, producing demos of “So Young,” “Everything’s Turning to Gold” (with Mel Collins, who’d played with Alexis Korner and King Crimson, on saxophone), “Fiji Jim,” and “I Can’t Help It,” among many others. Expectations for the new album started to build. Everyone knew the Some Girls music was the best the Stones had come up with in five years.

  The sessions broke in November, when Keith had to return to Toronto for a court date. He told the judge of his efforts to get off drugs, and frankly explained that, as an addict, he was compelled to take them again when the band resumed touring. Case continued to 1978. Keith may have seemed contrite in court, but both privately and publicly he remained defiant. “I’ve never had problems with drugs,” Keith told an interviewer. “Only with policemen.”

  Back in Paris in December, the sessions continued to run hot, especially after they found Sugar Blue, a twenty-two-year-old blues harmonica virtuoso named James Whiting. Born and raised in Harlem, he’d moved to Paris and was just scraping by, playing his harp in the Métro, when he let loose one night at a party at a friend’s place. As the party broke up, a man who Blue thought was in the film business gave him Mick Jagger’s phone number and told him to call. Sugar Blue thought it was a joke, but he was broke and called the number. He ended up playing harmonica on the next three Rolling Stones albums.

  Sugar Blue was one of the few outsiders to play on what was mostly an insular Stones album. Also joining the December sessions was ace keyboard player Ian “Mac” McLagan, late of the Faces, who turned up in Paris after Ron Wood strongly recommended him to replace Billy Preston.

  Mac had been one of the kids pressed up close to the Stones at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond in 1963. He’d been a mod pop star since 1965, when he joined the Small Faces, then spent five years in the Faces with Ronnie. He played Hammond organ and keyboards with a sharp London pop twist. Best of all for him, he was liked and respected by Stu, who’d cared for neither Nicky Hopkins nor Billy Preston.

  He arrived at Pathé-Marconi to find the Stones listening to a playback of pumped-up, hard-rocking “Shattered.” Woody put a couple of white lines on the piano for Mac and yelled, “Hey, Keith, look who I’ve got here!” Keith glanced at Mac snorting away. “Oh it’s ’im. I see Woody’s taken care of you, then.” Within an hour, Keith and Charlie started to play, then Wood and Bill fell in. Mac sat down at the Hammond, Stu at the piano. Pinching himself, Mac realized he was playing with his favorite band. Mick picked up his harmonica and started blowing, and the next incarnation of the Rolling Stones was in place.

  After dinner at an African restaurant, it was back to Keith’s place, where they played Mac some of the new songs. “Claudine” was a down and dirty, libelous riff about Claudine Longet, the ex-wife of crooner Andy Williams, who had just gotten off lightly after killing her skiing star boyfriend. “When the Whip Comes Down” had a heavy punk influence in its rent boy lyrics and blazing tempo. They played a funkafied version of the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination” and told Mac it needed an organ part.

  Later in the evening, just to embarrass Charlie, Keith jabbed a needle full of smack through his jeans and into his bottom. He left the syringe hanging there, walking around the room and laughing. “He’s fucking ’orrible,” Charlie murmured.

  Mac spent two days in the studio with the Stones, playing on both “Imagination” and “Miss You,” Mick’s love song for Jerry Hall; played them over and over and over again, settling into the Stones’ method of beating a song to death before recording the definitive version. Needing to get back to London for another session, Mac asked Woody about compensation for his work. Woody had a word with Mick, who looked pained. He came over to the Wurlitzer electric piano Mac was playing and said, “I’ve only got a few francs, is that all right?”

  “Sure, Mick—whatever you can afford.” Mick Jagger emptied his pockets and paid McLagan 120 francs—about twenty dollars.

  * * *

  Because We Can’t Remember Their Fucking Names!

  Early in 1978, after breaking for the holidays, the Rolling Stones returned to Paris to finish Some Girls amid sometimes-bitter hassles. Mick wanted a streetwise, minimalist disco-punk sound, while Keith was into dub reggae and rootsier styles. “[It was] the kind of edgy, punk ethos,” Mick said of the sessions. “The whole thing was to play it all fast, fast, fast. I had a lot of problems with Keith about it, but that was the deal at the time.” Mick’s new songs tended to be speedy guitar riffs in F. Strung out and disillusioned, Keith missed many sessions, so Ron Wood added pedal steel colors to “Faraway Eyes” and “Shattered.” Wood also come up with the flashy blues “Black Limousine,” closely related to Elmore James’s “Dream Girl.”

  By March 1978, the Stones had more than forty new songs on tape, enough for their next three albums. These rich sessions even produced great outtakes: “Indian Girl,” the country rocker “Misty Roads,” a long reggae jam titled “Jah Is Not Dead,” and multiple versions of “Claudine.” Keith’s “We Had It All” was a fully realized country love song, very sad and sentimental, with a weeping pedal steel wash. “Start Me Up” almost got on the album as a reggae song, but was left off because Keith worried that he’d unconsciously copied the main riff from something he’d heard on the radio.

  Mick Jagger exercised almost total control over the new album, but Keith had the last word, recutting his epic “Before They Make Me Run,” with engineer Dave Jordan using the Stones’ mobile studio. They gave the track a sonically different feel from the rest of the album, with Keith singing in a serpentine nasal drone that sounded like an Arabian vocal from Mars.

  Ron Wood had met a pretty ex-model named Jo Howard at a party in Kensington the year before. She’d been a pinup girl for the London tabloid The Sun, was dating Egyptian playboy Dodi Al-Fayid, hated rock music, thought Woody a “flash sod.” She told him she worked at Woolworth’s in Oxford Street, so he actually staked out the employee entrance until he realized she’d been pulling his leg. He finally tracked her down, won her with his sincerity, gallantry, his manic laugh and charm, and got her pregnant in Paris while working on tracks for his third solo album, for which he’d just signed with CBS. When she heard about it, Crissie Wood filed for divorce.

  They finished recording early in March. Mick took Jerry Hall to see Stargroves, which he was selling. Poking around the musty old house with its sixties orientalist trappings, she found Marianne Faithfull’s love letters to Mick in an old chest. She was a bit jealous when she realized how much Mick must have loved this wild woman, who was then rumored to be recording a stunning new album and planning a comeback.

  Then Mick and Keith returned to New York, where Some Girls was mixed at Atlantic Studios. A tape of “Miss You” was sent, sight unseen, to remix engineer Bob Clearmountain, who produced an eight-and-a-half-minute disco-mix version of the song for dance clubs—the Stones’ first extended twelve-inch “disco 45.” Mick and Jerry were living in posh East Side hotels, while Keith was with his family north of the city.

  In April 1978, they signed their first major act to Rolling Stones Records, an attempted linkup be
tween the rock and reggae movements.

  Both Keith and Mick had been interested in Peter Tosh for years. With Bob Marley, Tosh was the founder of the Wailers and a key figure in the reggae world. More radical than Marley, the tall and fierce Tosh (short for Winston Hubert MacIntosh, born in 1944) had left the Wailers and made a strong series of records that included furious reggae jams like “Steppin’ Razor,” “Legalize It,” and “Equal Rights.”

  “I don’t want no peace,” Tosh sang, “I want equal rights and justice.” He was an uncompromising Rastafarian street revolutionary who lived on a massive ganja intake and fearlessly sang, “Legalize it, and I will advertise it.” It also appealed to the Stones that Tosh fronted one of the best bands in the world, Word, Sound and Power, whose rhythm section—drummer Sly Dunbar and bassist Robbie Shakespeare—had invented a harder rocking form of reggae called rockers, which goosed the steady reggae beat with faster offbeats and flying cymbals. By signing Peter Tosh, the Stones would also get one of the hottest drummers in the business and would promote this new, coked-up Jamaican style.

  On April 22, Mick and Keith flew to Kingston to see their new act perform at the National Stadium in the legendary One Love Peace Concert, a historic show in which Bob Marley tried to unite the island’s two warring political gangs. Protected by armed troops, the entire Jamaican political and judicial hierarchy attended the concert. As a preamble to his part of the show, Peter Tosh stood onstage with a blazing ganja spliff and lectured the prime minister, the judges, and the cops, in an often obscene and hilarious rant, about how they were Babylonian oppressors who were down-pressing the children of Jah. Mick and Keith watched from the wings as Tosh and the band then played a stinging set of hard-core protest reggae that moshed down the place and justified their faith in him. A few weeks later, in retaliation for his public insolence, the Kingston police arrested Tosh for smoking ganja at Aquarius Studio in uptown Halfway Tree, where he was making his album. They took him to the station and beat him almost to death.

  Some Girls was released in May 1978 and saved the Rolling Stones’ career. Edgy, tender, and tough, with a steaming asphalt ambience, it was a reflection of the Stones pandering to dance music, punk rock, and new wave rock and roll. The die-cut album jacket, a pop montage of celebrity faces in an ad for cheap wigs, had to be recalled when the annoyed celebs (Lucille Ball, Raquel Welch) demanded their images be removed. “Miss You” was the album’s signature song and first single, a 4/4 dance jingle with a falsetto chorus and Mick’s put-on pimp’s voice selling Puerto Rican girls. Mel Collins played the sax solo, and Sugar Blue’s harp sounded like a night train in the Delta. “Miss You” was the Stones’ first American no. 1 single in seven years.

  “When the Whip Comes Down” followed, a raunchy rocker that toured the pre-AIDS Manhattan leather-bar underground with a crashing, punkish tag at the end. Bill Wyman’s superb bass line propelled the Whitfield/Strong soul classic “Just My Imagination,” with Charlie playing in-the-pocket drums and featuring cool, sustained ringing guitars. The Stones had boiled down the original riff, used “all the girls in New York” as a new text, and included the Temptations’ original (and difficult to sing) interior-monologue vocal bridge. Keith played a long guitar solo round the fade.

  “Some Girls” was the album’s parodic title track. Starting in a blast of blues harmonica, Mick sang of his sexual obsessions in an arch, jokey voice, running down the (de)merits of French, Italian, American, English, Chinese, and black girls in a lewd and politically incorrect diatribe that caused Atlantic to slap a warning label on the copies of Some Girls distributed to radio stations. The reference to “a house in Zuma Beach” was an insolent jab at Bob Dylan, who had lost his famous copper-domed palace north of Malibu in his recent divorce settlement. Asked by an interviewer why the album was called Some Girls, Keith laughed and said, “Because we couldn’t remember their fucking names!” The first side ended with “Lies,” a splendid punk homage to the manic speedball energy of the Sex Pistols and Sham ’69, with Ron Wood and Mick exchanging rapid-fire bursts of guitar noise.

  “Faraway Eyes” started side two with a typical Stones country parody. “Respectable” was Mick’s less-than-fond three-chord farewell to his wife: the rag trade girl, the queen of porn, the easiest lay on the White House lawn. “Get out of my life! Don’t fuck my wife! Don’t come back!” The song also referenced Keith’s legal troubles in the “Talking heroin with the president / If there’s a problem, son, I’ll bet it can be bent” lines, chanted to hard-core Chuck Berry changes.

  Keith Richards’s extraordinary “Before They Make Me Run” was a different type of farewell, a tacit commitment to retirement from a life of calamitous addiction and permanent death watch. Keith also wrote the love song “Beast of Burden,” another Stones salute to Motown cut in the same groove as “Imagination.” “Beast” was an explicit plea from Keith to Anita to not drag him down into degradation and despair. It was the most passionate song on a snake-eyed, dispassionate, market-calculated album.

  Some Girls ended with the subway rumble of “Shattered,” a journey through the Seventh Avenue anxieties of New York life in the seventies, when the great city seemed to be deteriorating into a bankrupt, decadent Calcutta. “Looka me!” shouted Mick, summoning all the sleazy, coked-up neurosis of an urban hustler desperately on the make.

  Some Girls recaptured the Rolling Stones’ distracted and aging audience. The record’s fearless attack and astute, nonpreachy social commentary was an artful mirror of the times. In England, the album reached no. 2, but in America, it was an almost instant no. 1 and stayed high in the charts for the rest of 1978. After selling 8 million copies, Some Girls proved to be the biggest Stones album ever.

  * * *

  Summer Romance

  May 1978. The Rolling Stones convened in Woodstock, the old bohemian village a hundred miles north of New York City, to rehearse for their summer tour. Mick and Jerry moved into a rented house and prepared to start work at the nearby Bearsville studio complex owned by Albert Grossman, ex-manager of Bob Dylan and The Band. Keith arrived in Woodstock with Anita. He was so wasted from heroin toxicity that he had to be carried from the car to his house. With millions of dollars in the balance, Keith had to get off heroin so the tour could be insured. He moved in with Mick and self-administered another black box cure, this time using pot, pills, and alcohol to ease the excruciating pain of withdrawal instead of going cold turkey. All the Stones tried to support Keith in what seemed his most dire hour. When the electrodes fell off his head, Jerry Hall (whom Keith disliked) would plug them back in again. Writhing in a semiconscious state on the living room couch, Keith managed to wean himself from heroin. Now he turned into a serious alcoholic instead, but one who could at least function well enough to rehearse and undertake a lucrative national tour.

  Peter Tosh’s first album for Rolling Stones Records also came together in Woodstock that spring. Recorded mostly in Kingston studios with synthesizers playing the melody lines, two of Tosh’s tracks got guitar overdubs by Keith and Wood: “Stand Firm” and the title song, “Bush Doctor.” Mick worked on Tosh’s first single, a reggae-soul version of Smokey Robinson’s Motown classic “Walk and Don’t Look Back.” It had a popping Sly and Robbie “riddim” format and a funny spoken dialogue between Mick and Tosh, who wasn’t exactly known for comedy routines. This was an attempt to tone down Tosh’s stern outlaw image (although Tosh had previously recorded the song in Jamaica in 1966) and replace it with a more dance-friendly vibe. This was incongruous because Tosh was foremost among reggae’s rabidly antidisco preachers, denouncing disco’s “get down” philosophy, urging his black audience to “get up” instead. But the Stones were totally committed to him, and he would open for them in stadiums all over America that summer. When they finally toured Africa, Tosh told Mick, the Stones would open for him.

  The Stones’ 1978 American tour started in Florida in June. Backstage at Lakeland, the first stop—where they appeared incognito as the Stoned Cit
y Wrestling Champs—Keith bought a stolen .38 Special revolver from a local security man. Ian McLagan had to learn twenty songs on two days notice, since Ronnie had brought him in at the last minute. A few days into the tour, having summoned Mac to his reggae-drenched hotel suite, Keith taught him how to skank, reggae style, with left and right hands bouncing off the keyboard. Mac had some problems with the tour contracts the Stones’ management ordered him to sign. When he balked, Mick sarcastically demanded to know if Mac was going to hold them for ransom, as Billy had done.

  By the second date in Atlanta (where they played as the Cockroaches), the Stones were already dispirited. They were trying to retool their arena shows for football stadiums, playing on a bare stage surrounded by a huge red lips and tongue logo painted on a scrim. A pair of giant tonsils floated over Charlie’s drums, the old 1960s Gretsch kit which he’d gotten out of storage for the tour. Mick was dressed in his concept of cheap disco fashion, dubbed the “F train look” after the New York subway that ran through immigrant Queens: red Puerto Rican trousers, white After Six dinner jackets, rakishly tilted Kangol cap. He looked too dopey for words, and the Stones were getting condescending reviews.

  Hard times for the Stones, despite creative revival and a hit album. Mick and Wood were both being divorced. Their trusted press agent, Les Perrin, died. Black radio boycotted the album because of the line “black girls just wanna get fucked all night,” which prompted Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights activist, to denounce the Stones. Threatened with jail in Canada, Keith and Anita had split. When Anita left Woodstock, Keith moved in with Ronnie and his new girlfriend, Jo Howard, who was pregnant. Keith started seeing a friend of Jo’s, a beautiful blond Danish model named Lily Wenglass. Lil, as she was called, was intelligent and sexy. She brought Keith back into the world of desire after his cure had taken hold, and made a lot of enemies early on by keeping his old friends away from him while he was trying to stay (relatively) straight.